Abandoned in fifteen minutesKatsugeki Touken Ranbu — The staff spent more effort on the pretty scenery rather than the pretty sword-boys’ clothing and jewelry this time, and the action is grimmer, but it’s still pretty silly.

Not abandoned yetElegant Yokai Apartment Life — Something like Natsume Yuujin-cho-lite. Bland business major takes a room in an apartment building where all his neighbors are yokai or eccentrics. It could be fun, or it could be dull, depending on where it goes after the introductory episode.Restaurant to Another World2 — Fine dining with dragons and demons. As with the preceeding, it could be fun, or it could be a waste of time.

I’ll give the last two at least one more episode. I don’t expect more than light entertainment from either, though. Perhaps something substantial will air this fall.

Update (July 10)
The new tenant in the yokai apartment building got a nosebleed nine minutes into the second episode. The hell with it.
The second installment of the restaurant stories was much like the first. Vignettes about the inhabitants of a high-fantasy world who visit the western-style restaurant serve primarily as excuses for food porn. The show remains pleasant and watchable, even for a non-foodie like me, but it’s not particularly memorable.
I sampled a few other new series, none of which are worth naming. This looks like a season to rewatch old favorites, work on your backlog, or do something else with your life.

It’s been a while since I last scanned anything from Richard’s box of old anime magazines. Here’s the September 1991 Newtype. The cover features the first Silent Möbius movie, which, I gather, featured excellent animation in the service of a creaky story.

I haven’t posted much recently, partly because I’ve been busy, but mainly because most of what I would post would be complaints. Right now I am irritated with Apple computers, my website host, Native Instruments, lawn mowers, the financial industry, pathogenic bacteria and viruses, idiots with drivers’ licenses, kids running amok, oblivious parents, the human race in general. Each of these is worth a lengthy rant — the last a lifetime of invective1 — but I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ll just mention The New York Times, which has discovered Crunchyroll.

Writer Glenn Kenny may be the world’s outstanding authority on Droopy cartoons, but about anime he’s an ignoramus. In “Boomerang and Crunchyroll: Of Old Cartoons and Fresh Anime,” he name-checks the movies Akira and Ghost in the Shell, thereby gaining negligible credibility as an otaku. He plainly knows nothing about anime series, which comprise the vast majority of Crunchyroll’s offerings, and he can’t be bothered to do minimal research. Of all the series, excellent and lousy, that Crunchyroll streams, the only one he mentions is Akashic Records of Bastard Magical Instructor, one I had dropped in less than five minutes. I would guess he picked that one because it is in the top row of the “simulcasts” directory and features a character named “Glenn.” He writes that the first episode

“… features a scene in which Glenn walks in on a roomful of his female students in their underwear, yells that he is not going to give in to the “cliché” that says he is now required to avert his eyes, takes a good, long stare and then is thrown back by an unseen force, blood spurting from his eyes.”

I have no desire whatsoever to watch the rest of the episode, but if you have, please tell me whether the blood spurts from his eyes, as Kenny says, or his nose. I have a hunch that our expert does not know the convention of anime nosebleeds.

The other Crunchyroll title Kenny mentions is Fist of the North Star, which he describes as “gruelingly violent.”

So, according to the alleged Newspaper of Record, anime, as represented by Crunchyroll, is fanservice and violence. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for the irresponsible and wrongheaded Charles Solomon, but at least he knew something about Japanese animation.

I sample new shows on Crunchyroll as they appear. Usually I lose interest within five minutes, but occasionally something surprises me, such as Flip Flappers last year or, more recently, ACCA. I found another surprise today, Alice to Zouroku, in which Sana, a young escapee from a nefarious research institute, meets Zouroku, a prickly old florist who takes no guff from anyone, be they yakuza, police or mahou shoujo.

Sana, called the “Red Queen” by the staff at the institute, has strange powers. She can teleport away from trouble, and she can look inside your mind. She has other talents as well, as do other young residents at the institute. She also has poor social skills and little knowledge of how the world works, consequences of never being allowed outside all her life until her escape.

There’s one episode left in ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Department, which will determine whether the show is an analysis of federalism or the tale of a bureaucrat who would be king. It deserves more comment than I have time and patience for right now. For further information, see M.O.’s brief discussion of the show at its midpoint here (beware of spoilers). Here are few screencaps for the post I’m not writing.

Watching ACCA may cause weight gainFan service, for certain sorts of fans: a Nikon SP rangefinder cameraPolitical intrigue is for the birds

ACCA is the only series of the winter season I managed to watch more than a couple of episodes of (other than the short Nobunaga no Shinobi). Nothing announced for the spring or summer seasons has caught my attention. However, in October there will be a new series based on Keiichi Sigsawa’s Kino no Tabi books. The original series is a minor classic and is on the short list of anime to recommend to people who think they don’t like anime. Now, would someone please license the books for North America, this time for real?

I recently found a recording of the music from Girls und Panzer by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The OST to the anime in its various forms was probably generated in a digital audio workstation with sample libraries. It’s quite listenable, but virtual orchestras can’t compare to well-recorded real instruments played by real, living musicians. The bass drum alone makes the upgrade worthwhile, particularly if you have powerful speakers or good headphones.2 The only disappointment with the TSO CDs is that they’re missing “Yuki no Shingun.” 3

Incidentally, I ordered the CDs from Amazon.co.jp on a Sunday, and they arrived the following Tuesday. If you want the quickest delivery from Amazon, forget Amazon Prime. Order overseas.

I watched the first episode of Kemono Friends, the post-apocalyptic children’s show that allegedly is insanely popular in Japan. I didn’t dislike it as much as Pete did, but I doubt that I’ll watch more, even if it does feature baobabs (above) and tree euphorbias (below).

*****

Although there are innumerable Alices in anime, the most Carrollian show of them all never mentions her. Instead, we have Ami, who finds a door to “Animal Yokocho” in the floor of her new bedroom. Things are done differently in AniYoko. Animal Yokocho is nominally a children’s show, and it’s okay for kids, but adults will better appreciate the absurdities. This celebration of friendship, nonsense and emotional blackmail probably will never be licensed for North America.1 However, I recently discovered that the first third of the show is available subtitled on youTube.

*****

Here’s a helpful article that walks you through registering and making purchases at Amazon Japan. One important detail it omits is that you cannot download music to addresses outside of Japan.

*****

Saturday I placed orders with both Amazon Japan and Amazon USA. Which will arrive first? This is how matters stood at 7:30 this morning:

I’m alive and more or less well (when I’m not coughing) but very busy right now, and I probably won’t post much for a while yet.

***

Many excellent older shows are streaming legally online. If, like me, you have no interest in the current crop of otaku pandering vehicles, you can skip them and watch something good. Here are four of my personal top five anime: Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain, Shingu and Mononoke. (Missing is Dennou Coil.)

A couple of under-appreciated favorites: Pupipo, Oh! Edo Rocket. The following is from the tenth episode of the latter. It doesn’t make any more sense in context:

***

Marie & Gali, one of Steven’sfavorites, has finally been completely subbed. What I’ve seen of the second season so far is inferior to the first, though it may get better once the focus shifts from the new girl and back to the silly scientists. It’s unlikely ever to be licensed for North America, but it’s available through irregular channels.

I couldn’t resist making my own 2048 game, using images from the Girls und Panzer movie. Beware: this can be terribly addictive, and if you have work that must be done, do not click here.

Update: I made another one using images from GATE and a different online game maker.

(If you are unfamiliar with this sort of game, you play it by using the arrow keys on your keyboard to push the tiles around. There are eleven (2,048=2^11) different tiles; revealing the last two is not easy.)

Flip Flappers is the most interesting series I’ve seen since Kill la Kill and Shin Sekai Yori, conceptually and artistically. Each episode is different from every other episode. Much of it is pure fun, with frequent shout-outs and parodies, but there are depths and eccentricities and mysteries enough to inspire reams of speculation and analysis in the otakusphere. If there are twelve episodes, there are only three left to explain just what is going on. While the writers seem to know exactly what they are doing, I’m still concerned that it could fall apart at the end, or end with nothing resolved. We’ll see.

I reviewed the first episode, looking for Mimi. Do you see her in any of these screencaps?

Something else I wonder about: Is Cocona asking the right question above? Consider these names: Cocona, Mimi, Papika, Toto, Yayaka, Yuyu. One doesn’t fit the pattern. Throughout the show, Papika’s behaviour has reminded me of a playful Labrador retriever, sniff sniff. What is she? What would happen if the band around her ankle were removed? She and Cocona may be a complementary pair, but a pair of what?

The first episode of Miss Bernard Said. mentioned Yasutaka Tsutsui, and I checked to see if any more of his books have been translated into English. A quick search showed nothing new. However, I did find translations of a few of his stories online:

Those of us with blogs, we need to post cheesecake in [Steven Den Beste’s] memory. I think he’d like that.

Steven did indeed like pictures of pretty girls. However, I don’t share his taste for cheesecake. Instead, I grabbed several thousand of the pictures from the header at Chizumatic and assembled them into a slide show with music from Girls und Panzer. The pictures flash by at a rate of five per second; epileptics beware.

Cocona’s green rabbit in Flip Flappers is named “Uexküll” in both the Crunchyroll and Viewster subtitles. That doesn’t seem like a traditional Japanese name, so I did a little searching and discovered theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. According to Wikipedia,

Uexküll was interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). Uexküll argued that organisms perceived the experience of living in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, ‘self-in-world’ subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as milieu, situation, embedding-lit. German for environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the “Umgebung” which would be the living being’s surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the observer. The umwelt is composed of two parts, the innenwelt or self-oriented features, and the Umgebung, or world-oriented features. Together, they describe the individual’s subjective viewpoint, or embedding, which has the property of being ubiquitous, as compared to the observer’s objective viewpoint, which has the property of being universal.

Um, okay. Possibly Uexküll’s Umwelt and Umgebung lurk in Pure Illusion as Faust does in Madoka Magica, though it will take someone with more patience with modern philosophy than I have to explain it all.

In Flip Flappers, serious-minded student Cocona sees a red-haired girl flying on a powered surfboard. Later the girl pops up behind Cocona, sniffs her, and introduces herself as “Papika” before they fall down the rabbit hole concrete pipe into Wonderland “Pure Illusion,” accompanied by a small yellow robot/cyborg. There they find themselves in a winter landscape, but it’s apparently not very cold, and the snow is sweet. More odd things happen for no obvious reason. Cocona loses her glasses, which Papika retrieves with considerable difficulty. Cocona’s eye change color, her short black hair becomes long and purple, and she finds a glowing blue object in her hand. A variety of other characters are introduced, including some who observe Papika remotely through laboratory equipment.

Flip Flappers reminds me of Kyousougiga in its anything-can-happen eccentricity, but whether it’s as well thought-out as the earlier series remains to be seen. Masumi Itou is part of the music crew; her presence is clearly discernable in the ending theme. I’ll probably keep watching Flip Flappers unless it turns stupid.

Update: You can also watch Flip Flappershere. The translation is different from Crunchyroll’s and makes a little more sense in some places.

Three of the students in Miss Bernard Said read a lot; the fourth one would rather talk about books than read them. It’s a flimsy framework even for a short, but it is about books, which compensates for a lot.

I know I watched Kiitaro’s Yokai Picture Diary, but I don’t remember anything about it — which might be all you need to know.

Against my better judgement, I tried ClassicaLoid but didn’t last long. It was a dumb as I had feared.

I watched three minutes of Drifters, which was a bloody mess, and I mean that literally. Ick. It seems that the gore might not be its greatest failing. Other shows that I quit in five minutes or less include Soul Buster and Occultic;Nine.

In Matoi the Sacred Slayer, men get silly when they see a little cleavage, and women take advantage of it. Meh. There might be a good mahou shoujo story beyond the fanservice, but I don’t have the patience to find out. (Steven has a more positive take.)

The protagonist of Nazotokine is a flat-chested secretary at an advertising agency who finds herself trapped in a strange place until she solves some riddles. She’s no longer a kid, but she nevertheless undergoes a mahou shoujo-style transformation into a decidedly non-secretarial outfit. Suddenly she is no longer flat. Even though it’s another short, it felt stretched out. I might watch another episode to see if the riddles are of any interest.

Sengoku Chōjū Giga is yet another short. This one uses the style of the proto-manga Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to tell silly tales of Odo Nobunaga. Here Nobunaga is a cuckoo, and is cuckoo. The art is distinctive, but otherwise this is an ordinary gag anime.

I looked at random first episodes of the fall shows debuting on Crunchyroll. Overall it looks like another season for watching old favorites and working on my backlog, but a couple show promise.

Easily the best is The Ancient Magus’ Bride. Chise, a girl without a family who sees yokai, lives with a sorcerer in the English (I think) countryside. Her guardian/owner/future husband has an animal skull for a head, but he seems to be a decent, caring fellow who enjoys a cup of tea. At various times I was remineded of Spirited Away, Natsume Yuujin-cho, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman and The Twelve Kingdoms. It’s worth checking out if any of these names mean something to you.

Unfortunately, The Ancient Magus’ Bride is an OVA rather than a regular series. There will be two more episodes released six months apart. If you want more, the manga might be worth tracking down.

A better broomstick (or “boomstick”?)

Izetta: The Last Witch is yet another alternate history of WWII. This time, the principal characters are a strong-willed and capable princess from a small country in central Europe, and a “white witch” with red hair. What particularly interested me was the music. One scene is set at a performance of The Magic Flute, and we hear parts of both of the Queen ofNight’s arias. It’s probably too much to hope for more Mozart in future episodes, but I’ll likely will watch another episode or two to see how the story develops. The ending art hints that there will be yuri; if that happens, I’ll drop the show.

Other shows I sampled:

Nyanbo! features CG cardboard cats doing cardboard cat things during its brief episodes. A character I would rather watch appears momentarily at the end.

Guess who

Kaiju Girls is a sort of mahou shoujo parody with very short episodes, except that the chibi girls transform into chibi monsters. It’s almost too light to call “fluff,” as is Ninja Girl and Samurai Master.

I watched five minutes of Tiger Mask. Ugh. The hell with it.

To my astonishment, I made it all the way through the first episode of the latest iteration of Time Bokan. It straddles the border of silly and stupid, but it might be tolerable for those who occasionally enjoy a little dumb humor.

This looks strangely familiar

Magical Girl Raising Project looks like an attempt to be another Madoka Magica, this time pitting the girls against each other in a battle royale. Without Shaft, Akiyuki Shinbo, Gen Urobuchi and Yuki Kajiura, though, it’s not likely to work. The black and white parti-colored mascot is probably a shout-out to Danganronpa, a show I have zero interest in. Ubu is watching it; I’ll check in a few weeks to see what he thinks of it.

Magical Girl Raising Project is populated by girls. (People obsessed with “gender identity” will be pleased to learn that one of the girls is not a traditional female.) Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru is populated entirely by young men with pointy chins, many of whom also wear red eyeliner or dangly earrings. Gee, I never realized that swords are so effeminate. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, and it’s rendered innocuous by horseplay and slapstick, but it’s not for me and probably not for you, either.

One curious note: both Time Bokan and Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru deal with historical revisionism. Neither do it as well as Peabody and Sherman.

One of the many shows I don’t plan to watch this fall is ClassicaLoid. ANN describes it thus:

The story follows high school students Kanae and Sōsuke, who live in a provincial town that is trying to revitalize itself with music. One day, suddenly “Classicaloid” versions of Beethoven and Mozart appear in front of Kanae and Sōsuke. When the suspicious-looking Classicaloids play music they call “mujik,” it has a strange power: stars start to fall, and giant robots appear. Now every day is tumultuous. Eventually, more Classicaloids start to appear such as Bach, Chopin, and Schubert. What is the great power that the Classicaloids have? Are they friends or foe to humanity?
The show’s music will include pop, rock, techno, and other arrangements of famous classical works, arranged by well-known Japanese musicians. The official website states that the show will also feature “battles, slapstick comedy, heartwarming stories, and light love(?).”

It sounds dumb, and while you are welcome to do what you like with Liszt and Tchaikowsky, I don’t appreciate anyone monkeying around with Chopin.

One of the composers victimized is a certain Bądarzewska. I’d never heard of this person, so I did a little searching and discovered that the composer is presumably Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. She wrote a piano piece called “The Maiden’s Prayer.” From Wikipedia:

Percy Scholes, writes in The Oxford Companion to Music (9th edition, reprinted 1967) rather unkindly of Bądarzewska: “Born in Warsaw in 1838 [sic] and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three [sic]. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilised world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allen of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.”
The composition is a short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody, and others have described it as “sentimental salon tosh”. The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as a “dowdy product of ineptitude.”

The only current show that I’m following is Mob Psycho 100. Though less overtly comic than One Punch Man, it has much of the same sensibility, with a similar contrast of naiveté and cynicism, and with a similar satirical edge.

***

I gave up on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress half-way through the first episode. Pixy stuck it out and reports that it is

Completely implausible. These people are so dumb the zombies would starve to death.

***

At one point in Summer Wars (recommended), a list of people who solved a puzzle in the movie is displayed. While rewatching the movie recently, I spotted a familiar name. You might find other names of interest, variously misspelled.

There are a bunch more pictures that will take some time to go through.

Update: I’ve edited as many as I’m going to. As usual, the organizers did their damnedest to make taking pictures difficult, and none that I took are any better than snapshots. You can see them all here.